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AMD-Zen-Feature

AMD posted its financial results for the 4th quarter of 2022 this calendar week and provided additional details on its plans for its upcoming Ryzen and Vega products. Both of these launches are critical to AMD's futurity — Ryzen, its upcoming desktop processor, is based on AMD'due south first brand-new architecture in over five years and is meant to close a disquisitional operation gap between itself and Intel. Vega will be AMD's first brand-new GPU architecture since GCN debuted only over five years ago also, and is critical to the visitor'due south efforts in the graphics card market place.

Nosotros'll talk nearly both products, but let'south hit the financial details beginning. AMD delivered year-on-yr improvements in Q4 in almost every unmarried category. Quarterly revenue was downward seasonally compared with Q3, but that's in-line with expectations. Currently, virtually of AMD'due south revenue is driven past panel sales, and Microsoft and Sony gild the most hardware in Q3 every bit they ramp up to meet holiday demand.

AMD-Q4

AMD's revenue was up 15% year-on-year, its gross margin is five percentage points higher, and its operating loss has been much reduced. The company has more cash on-hand, and while it's carrying a higher inventory load, that's likely related to the upcoming Ryzen launch. Full debt is also significantly lower, at $1.435B, down from $two.237 billion a year ago.

AMD-SegmentReports

AMD'south segment reports are likewise improving. Total Computing and Graphics revenue rose to $600 million in Q4, a 27% gain quarter-on-quarter and a 28% gain twelvemonth-on-year. Sales in these businesses typically meridian in the quaternary quarter, but AMD'south comeback is much stronger than seasonal gains typically business relationship for, and likely reflect improved product sales. During the briefing call, CEO Lisa Su said desktop CPU sales roughshod in advance of Ryzen's launch, and so the gains we are seeing here reverberate improved demand for AMD's seventh-generation Bristol Ridge APUs besides as its Polaris family of GPUs. Full AMD C&G revenue increased 9% for the full year 2022 compared with all of 2022 and the visitor shrank its total year operating loss to half of what information technology was in 2022.

In the enterprise, embedded, and semicustom segment (by and large the PS4 and Xbox One), acquirement improved 4% in Q4 2022 compared with Q4 2022, and v% for the total-year 2022 compared with 2022. One obvious question is how this matches expectations for console sales, given that both Microsoft and Sony launched refreshed versions of their platforms in the back half of the yr, but this data doesn't give us much to proceed. AMD has previously said its licensing and royalty agreements with both console manufacturers were front-loaded to pay the highest royalty rates at the beginning of the business organisation wheel when both platforms launched. Without knowing more most the rate schedule and any subsequent agreements made regarding the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro, nosotros can't actually speculate about how these launches impacted AMD'south earnings or how well the platforms sold. AMD's $3 1000000 operating loss for Q4 2022 is excellent, relative to how the visitor has performed the concluding few years.

Launch dates for Naples, Ryzen, and Vega

During the conference phone call, CEO Lisa Su made some specific remarks regarding when we will see Ryzen and Vega in the market place. Ryzen will launch "in early March," while Vega is set to debut in Q2 of this year. Naples, AMD's updated server platform, will too launch in the second quarter. AMD reports this production will target workloads "that will benefit from more threads, college memory, as well as I/O-bound applications. And then we await cloud, large information applications as well as traditional enterprise."

Su too said Ryzen will launch in the retail aqueduct first, followed by system integrators and OEMs. If you're looking forward to the core, you should be able to purchase one on launch twenty-four hours (AMD has also given guidance that Ryzen will be a difficult launch, with plenty of product on store shelves for purchase).

AMD also noted it has Zen APUs already in the works (Raven Ridge) and scheduled for launch in the back half of 2022. Raven Ridge is expected to use DDR4, not HBM or HBM2, but can still offer 50% more than memory bandwidth than AMD's older DDR3-based APUs. APU graphics functioning tends to be extremely retentiveness bandwidth-jump, and then nosotros expect a healthy leap on that basis alone, before GPU performance improvements or delta colour compression are taken into consideration.

According to Lisa Su, Raven Ridge is "a very potent notebook part when you call back virtually sort of the high end notebooks, ii-in-1s, and those types of things. But yes, it can likewise be used in desktop." Over the by few years, AMD has positioned its APUs as its lower-end and mainstream desktop parts while its half-dozen-and-eight-core desktop chips anchored the (relative) high end. Su's comments seem to imply Ryzen will be the focus of AMD's desktop plans this yr, but we won't know how Raven Ridge (Zen APU) and Pinnacle Ridge (Zen CPU) fit together until AMD shares more details publicly.